Health scan

Bonding over Video games Time to share the Wii remote, dad. A new research shows that playing video games with a parent improved family ties and made the girls better behaved. The Journal of Adolescent Health reports that girls between 11 and 16 years who played video games with their parents had better social skills, lower aggression and a stronger bonding. To the boys it makes no difference.

Inherited addictionSmoking is an inherited addiction that can be transferred from parents to their children, reports the journal, Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics. Smoking causes heart attacks, stroke and cancers. Sons have a 24% risk of addiction to cigarettes if both parents smoke, which falls to 12% if neither smoked. The risk of addiction was 1% lower for girls. In single-parent homes, moms raise risk in sons by 32% and daughters by 28%.

For women, size matters Women earn a lot more if they manage to stay thin throughout their lives, but the reverse is true for men: a bigger belly leads to a bigger bank balance. Slim women who gradually put on 10-12 kg over the years can expect to earn up to £10,000 (about Rs 7.4 lakh) a year less than if she had kept the weight off, reports a study in the Journal of Applied Psychology.

Women who are large to begin with and gain more weight suffer a loss of earnings, but the discrepancy is smaller than for those who started out svelte. In contrast, thin men who put on weight over time saw a rise in their salaries by £5,000 (around Rs 3.7 lakh) a year. The differences were likely due to the subconscious judgments employers make about men and women according to their shape and size.

Girl’s cuppa cheerCoffee is a surefire cure for drowsiness, but now a study claims it helps women — not men — perform better in high-pressure situations.

A study in the Journal of Applied Science reports that a cup of java increases women’s ability to perform under stress, while it makes men slower and less confident. The effects of coffee varied with gender because of the differences in how men and women responded to stress.